


Prestidigitation

by TheHousekeeper



Category: The Mentalist
Genre: 6x15: White as the Driven Snow, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:01:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26634019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHousekeeper/pseuds/TheHousekeeper
Summary: It's not a power he wants, to be so skilled a magician that he can bring anything into the world, take anything out of it.Or, a six-thousand-word 6x15 post-ep based on the quarter-second in which Jane double-checks that he still has all his fingers. Jisbon friendship, pretty much, but you could squint at it a bit.
Relationships: Patrick Jane/Teresa Lisbon
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	Prestidigitation

**Author's Note:**

> This post-ep… got a little out of hand. The end of this episode is a little ridiculous, plot-wise (I mean, Rigsby takes a _shotgun blast to the chest_ and manages to kill two people) but there is also _so much_ missing time in the last five minutes, and so many emotional loose ends left dangling. I started from just one: right after Rigsby shoots Haibach and Jane collapses in relief, he holds up his hands and looks at his fingers to make sure Haibach didn't actually cut any of them off. It's heartbreakingly human.
> 
> [Crossposted to FF.net.]

Rigsby has been in surgery for five hours and forty-three minutes.

Lisbon has been checking the clock on her phone obsessively. Usually, she’d be able to rely on Jane to keep track – when he’s awake, he has an uncanny sense of the passing of time, down to the minute – but he isn’t here. Not really. He’s somewhere in the hospital still, she’s pretty sure, but the last time she’d caught sight of him was a couple of hours ago now, and then he’d been standing motionless with a Styrofoam cup of cooling tea arrested partway to his mouth, and the space behind his eyes had been entirely vacant.

So it’s up to Lisbon. And her cellphone clock, which she keeps checking with a compulsion that comes from the feeling that any second she misses might be the one during which Rigsby slips away.

The paper cups from the cafeteria are cheap, and the machine-overheated coffee is burning the skin of her palm, the pads of her thumbs, the thin fragile whorls covering the base of her fingers, beneath which the tiniest blood vessels beat. She slips back into the waiting room and sinks down next to Van Pelt, holding out one of the coffees.

Van Pelt, startled out of her blank stare, pushes her elbows off her knees to take it and tries a small smile. It’s bloodshot and watery, but Lisbon likes that she’s making the effort, that there’s enough of her left to be sincerely grateful and try to show it, that not all of her is down in that cold sterile room in which Rigsby is being cut open and sewn back together. “Thanks.” Van Pelt wraps her hands around the cup like its searing heat is only mild warmth, soothing and necessary.

“Welcome.” Lisbon takes a tiny sip from her own coffee. It instantly burns all the feeling from her tongue, and lands with an acid splash in her stomach. She sets the cup on the small table beside her chair. Her hands are red with residual heat. She looks at them. Folds them over and over each other, the backs cold, the palms tingling. Almost she expects something to appear in them. A quarter, or a card, or a breathing bird. Something to hold. Some miracle. The kind of small, divine marvel she’s become accustomed to.

_Dear Mary, Mother of God, full of grace…_

“Hey,” starts Van Pelt. She’s playing with the rolled rim of the paper cup, worrying at it with her thumbnail. Her hair hangs lank, hiding her eyes. Gauze obscures the gashes on her fingers, her knuckles, and there are deep red lines in the sides of her wrists, so clear that Lisbon can see the pattern of zip ties etched in her skin. Her throat goes tight.

Van Pelt looks up, frowning. “You should check on Jane.”

“Jane’s fine,” says Lisbon on autopilot, because that particular response pathway is programmed into her brain. A doctor taps on her knee, her foot kicks out; someone suggests Jane is cracking, she reassures them he’s fine.

Van Pelt tucks her hair behind her ear and sits up a little more, catching Lisbon’s eye to show her that she’s serious. “No, boss. I’ve seen him pretty desperate before, but I’ve – I’ve _never_ seen him like that.”

Looking back at Van Pelt – her eyes red, lips pinched, hands trembling but jaw still maintaining the stubborn thrust it’s had since O’Laughlin – Lisbon is overcome by a rush of affection for her. Only someone with a heart as big as Grace’s could, in the midst of her own terror and misery, with doctors pulling multiple bullets out of her husband’s chest, still have enough love left to be worried about the friend who almost got him killed. Lisbon isn’t sure how Van Pelt has done it – how, after everything she’s been through, she’s become stronger and harder without becoming _less_ , without losing anything of herself. Lisbon is a survivor, sure, but she sometimes suspects that she hasn’t been a whole person since the age of twelve.

Van Pelt bites her lip, looks away again, probably reliving those moments outside the cabin, in the snow. Lisbon had been there, afterward. She knows: how unrelentingly bright everything had been, how mercilessly clear and unaffected, how blank the sky, how cold all the edges. “He was terrified, Lisbon. He was like a little boy.”

She swallows as if she can’t stomach it, eyes squeezing shut in pain, and Lisbon wonders how Jane must have acted, what his voice must have sounded like, for Van Pelt to look this way even now at the thought. She feels her heart judder, a sick twinge like someone is tugging it sideways. For all that Jane had seemed close to madness – to others and even, sometimes, to her – when he was single-mindedly pursuing Red John, however close he’d seemed to the edge, he’d never let himself drop over. He wouldn’t. Not when he still had something left to do. It was why, she’d realized in hindsight, she never should have been fooled by his fake breakdown. He’s been more relaxed since his return, more at ease in his mind, and God knows he seems to any reasonable human to be mentally healthier. But he’s also fragile now in a way he’d never been before. He can afford to break.

Lisbon is trying very hard not to think of the state in which she found him in the mountains.

She rests a hand over Van Pelt’s, stilling her anxious fiddling with the cup rim. “Don’t worry. You just keep your mind on Rigsby,” she says. “I’ll find Jane.”

\+ + +

Cold, oh God it’s so cold.

Not all of them could fit in the chopper, and even if they could have, someone had to stay at the scene, if at all possible. And even if Rigsby _hadn’t_ been shot with two different firearms _in the chest_ , and even if Van Pelt _hadn’t_ been abducted and in need of a hospital herself, Jane was still the one who worked for the FBI, in however unorthodox a capacity. So he helped the medics load Rigsby onto the helicopter, and squeezed Grace’s hand, and then he sat back down in the snow and waited for Lisbon to arrive. She and Fischer had left Austin an hour ago, the pilot relayed; the chopper would be back at the cabin with them on board in three or four hours. Then the pilot had lifted off, leaving Jane alone with two bodies in the snow.

He’s killed before: with guns, with his bare hands. The ultimate magic trick. Jane can make anything disappear. Coins, cards, rabbits, security footage, freedom, murder charges, a wife, a daughter; whole lives, even, blood and bone and heartbreak. _It’s not a gift_ , he says, often, and no, no, it’s not, not a power he wants, to be so skilled a magician that he can bring anything into the world, take anything out of it. He’s killed before, but somehow it is eerie, now, to be left here in so silent a spinning landscape, so close to the pale sky –

_And I looked, and behold: a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him_

– with two corpses, with the two evil people they used to be. He can go inside the cabin. Put them out of sight. There will be a fire, and a kettle and tea. Jane has never had trouble taking warmth from the dead. The dead need nothing: justice is for the living.

But when he climbs up the porch steps and stands in the open doorway, he can see through to the kitchen, where there is a smeared pool of dark blood on the floor next to the overturned chair, and he feels bile burn his throat. He stumbles back down, out, blind in the bright snow from the dim cabin interior, a nova after the dark between stars. Instead he paces back and forth near the two bodies, trying not to look at them. The dead need nothing, he tells himself, and can do nothing in return.

He can’t stop moving his fingers. His thoughts are frantic, flowing unstanchably now and too fast, as if to make up for the blank period earlier in which they turned to syrup in the cold clench of his panic and he could think of nothing, nothing at all – and behind them is a running count, over and over, as he wiggles his fingers one by one. _One two three four five, six seven eight nine ten._ He paces, looks at the trees. Pinyon pine, he catalogues. Juniper, white spruce. _Thumb index middle ring pinkie, thumb index middle ring pinkie._ With an elevation of 7,199 feet, Santa Fe is the highest state capital in the United States. _One two three four five, six seven eight nine ten._ The conifer forests of the Sangre de Cristo mountains provide a migration corridor for the threatened Canada lynx. In Latin: _Lynx canadensis_. In Latin: _pollex secundus medius annularis minimus, pollex secundus medius annularis minimus_. The paws of the Canada lynx can spread to a width of ten centimeters to support the cat’s weight over deep powdery snow. _Thumb index middle ring pinkie, thumb index middle ring pinkie._ The rustle in that sagebrush by the blue spruce is probably not a lynx. _One two three four five, six seven eight nine ten._

He counts. He counts. He paces until his thin leather shoes, the right sole growing a hole again beneath the ball of his foot, are soaked through, and then he considers the tree stump. There is a smudged handprint in the otherwise untouched snow on its surface: his, his hand as it fluttered under Haibach’s like a trapped butterfly. Jane wiggles his fingers again: _thumb index middle ring pinkie, thumb index middle ring pinkie_. Then he sits directly on the imprint of his hand’s desperate struggle.

His hands. He looks at them. All the things they could make disappear from the world. All the things they can’t bring back.

He moves his fingers. Reminds himself yes, yes they are still there, yes he still has a chance to put things back. To put them right.

But cold. Oh God it’s so cold, and he has no coat, and he’s alone in the mountains with the dark coming down –

_in the high montane biomes of the Southwestern United States, night can bring drops in temperature of more than eighteen degrees Fahrenheit_

– and soon he cannot feel his fingers, he can’t tell if they’re there. Maybe they’re not and he only thought they were, earlier, because of phantom effects, nerves that never stop firing, only they’ve stopped now, they must have because he can’t feel anything, even though – he checks – there they are, his fingers, pale and shaking, only if he looks away he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know anymore. He presses them to his cheeks and digs them in, _one two three four five six seven eight nine ten_ , then tucks them under his armpits, beneath his suit jacket, to warm them, but it doesn’t work, and he can’t _see_ them there, he can’t be sure.

When Lisbon arrives, hair blown across her face from the chopper’s downdraft, he doesn’t hear her coming. The crunch of her footsteps is annihilated by the roar and the pressure waves of the helicopter rotors. She puts a hand on his shoulder and he nearly jumps out of his skin.

“ _Jesus_ , Jane,” she breathes, and she is stripping off her coat. He means to ask her why, to tell her no, don’t, it’s cold, she needs her coat, but when he tries to speak he finds that his lips are numb and he can’t make them form the shape of letters. “You don’t even have a jacket.” She throws her coat over his shoulders, but it slips off immediately: he is shaking, he realizes now, shaking too hard to move, though he has not stopped wiggling his fingers. Lisbon catches the coat as it slides, tucks it more firmly around him. She locates his lockjaw-stiff elbow and pulls him upright. He stumbles. _Where are my feet,_ he thinks, for he has made them disappear.

The sky is no longer pale. It is a royal blue dulled by snow clouds, the cold a gaseous vapour veiling the horizon to the silver of sea bream scales, scales with their quick light like vitrified water. So much water here, so much salt, all of it locked frozen. Lisbon is looking at him with a strange expression on her face. He’s seen it before. When? It arrives: _It was a locked room_. She’d looked the same way then: not pitying but gentle, gentle like only a heart he’s broken can be. Jane breaks hearts like horses, brings them hard to bear. It’s the only way they’ll move to his whim. It’s the only way they’ll love him.

He has to break them first. Rein and fist and trickery.

Beneath the gentleness, though, he sees something flicker. Fury. Lisbon is enraged with him, though she’s keeping it pressed down. For now. For now, she is being tender.

“Why don’t we go inside, okay?” she asks.

 _Inside_ , Jane thinks, and he looks at the cabin, appearing abandoned now in the twilight, the fire in the hearth having long since consumed its own embers. And oh, no, it’s not a gift, no kind of blessing that he can picture the inside of it so well after being there only once: the rotted floorboards in the living room that gave under his weight, scattered with ashes; the plaid curtains; the ancient rocking chair with its sagging back cushion; the reupholstered armchair coated in dust; the kitchen, the broken back-door windowpane, the shotgun, the shot, the blood, Rigsby, Grace –

“No,” he says, stumbling back, away from Lisbon, who wants to take him in there. Acid is burning up his esophagus; he swallows and tastes bile. Swallows again. Keeps it down. “No, no, not inside.”

“Okay, Jane,” Lisbon says, reaching out for him again. Her fingers catch on the puffy down sleeve of her coat, hanging empty off his left shoulder. “Okay. Okay. We’ll stay here. It’s fine.”

Jane wants to explain, but his teeth are chips of ice, his lips ponderous and swollen with blue, and all he can scrape together is, “Rigsby –”

“In surgery,” said Lisbon. “Cho went to the hospital to be with Van Pelt. Let’s go meet them there, all right?”

Jane works his numb tongue and words come out, though he doesn’t feel them leave and their content is a surprise. “I thought he was dead.”

It is hard to see Lisbon in the dark, hard to see anything. Smell, instead: cold, snow, dried sage, cold, juniper, pine resin, cold; and underneath, the dead bodies, blood – Jane gags once, suddenly, before he can get himself under control again.

“Jesus, Jane,” Lisbon says again, helplessly, and this time her voice steadies him. He holds up a hand, which is shaking so hard it looks like he’s waving; but that’s okay, that’s just the cold. It’s just the cold.

“I’m fine,” he grates, standing up straight and setting his body language to rights. Spine straightening like a bronze shield, chin up on a wire. “Really Lisbon, I’m fine, I swear.”

Fischer comes out of the cabin. Jane hadn’t seen her go in. God, he must really be out of it. She takes in the tableau with one assessing look, and Jane is grateful that he’s gotten himself back under control in time.

“I’ve got the scene,” Fischer says to Lisbon. “Field office has already dispatched a team. You guys should get to the hospital. We can take statements there later.”

Lisbon nods and finds Jane’s elbow again, hustling him toward the helicopter and on board. The pilot acknowledges him gravely, and Jane nods back and tries to strap himself in. He can’t: his fingers won’t work, and his hands are shaking too much, and Lisbon’s puffy jacket is slick beneath the safety belt. She reaches over and buckles him in.

“Jane,” she says, but quietly, and Jane can pretend not to hear her over the roar as they take off. She doesn’t try again, and he tells himself he’s relieved.

He closes his eyes – windowpane breaking, shotgun blast, Rigsby’s grunt, Grace screaming – and snaps them back open immediately. Instead he tilts his head toward the window and watches the bare-branched aspens and frosted conifers stream past far below. He imagines lynx on their splayed paws sinuously winding between the trees, loping over the shadowed snow, a far more primeval magic than the kind he pretends to. Magnetic: they are migratory, after all, like birds. Jane feels a kinship with all creatures that migrate. He knows what it is to wander. He knows the uneasiness of home being everywhere and yet being at home nowhere. He knows the landscape of exile. The feeling of precariously balancing your weight on a fragile surface, with a depth of cold beneath.

There are no stars, not tonight, but Jane knows exactly where they are burning far behind the clouds. In his mind he brings them bright into being on the frozen wash of navy sky, and, one by one, he makes them disappear.

\+ + +

She finds him by looking for a couch.

There is an old one, shoved against a vending machine in a nook off a hallway in the oncology wing. The alcove is dark, lit only by the blue light shining through the enormous Pepsi logo on the glowing front of the vending machine. Jane is sitting stiffly upright on the couch, not lying down, his feet flat on the floor. A half-full Styrofoam cup is in his hands. Lisbon suspects it’s the same one from earlier. The ripples on the dark liquid inside catch gleams of blue light as the cup trembles: his hands are still shaking, and his shoulders are hunched despite his upright posture. He must still be cold, she thinks. The hospital, like all medical facilities, holds an austere chill made worse by sterility. And he didn’t finish his tea.

Lisbon eases the Styrofoam out of his grasp and replaces it with her coffee, which has cooled from solar core to a mere thermonuclear. Reflexively, without looking at her or seeming to know what he’s doing, Jane takes a sip. Then he makes a face, and, with relief, Lisbon sees his eyes focus.

“It’s coffee,” he complains.

“It’s hot. Drink it. And scootch over.”

Bemused, Jane makes space for her on the couch. It’s more of a loveseat: even with his efforts, they are touching all along her right side. Jane throws her a look. She glares. Raising one hand in surrender, he takes another sip of coffee, then fakes a dramatic shudder. It would feel normal, reassuring, if she couldn’t tell that the shudder was only half-false, if she couldn’t feel the tiny tremors still running through him. Trying not to be obvious about it, she presses closer, hiding it with a companionable bump of her shoulder against his.

“Hey,” she says, “you okay?”

“Never better,” says Jane, and fine, they’re going to pretend now that everything when she found him at the cabin never happened. She expected that. But she’s not sure she’s okay with it, not this time.

“Still cold?”

Jane shrugs. “A little.”

A surge of anger propels her to her feet. It doesn’t take much: the anger has been boiling under her skin for hours. Since she heard what Jane and Rigsby had done – the abduction, the lawyer, hours and hours of no contact. She feels like the God of the Old Testament.

_The Lord revengeth, and is wrathful… The mountains quake before him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all who dwell in it. His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him…_

Fury like lightning buzzing inside her. Ready to strike down anyone, even those who love her most. Especially them.

She’s made more furious by the fact that she _can’t_ blow up at Jane, not right now – not with the way he’s still shaking, sitting small and absent on the couch. Not remembering how her heart had stopped when she’d come off the chopper to see him sitting on a snowy tree stump in the mountain dusk as if frozen, maybe _actually_ frozen, wearing a look of horror. All she wants to do is shake him until he _hurts_ , but he hurts already, and not at her hand. So she has to be gentle with him, and the necessity of that makes her fists clench.

And the thing that makes her angriest: that she isn’t sure how much of it is real. He’s in pain, definitely; but he could be playing it up for sympathy. He’s done it before. He knows she turns tender when he’s hurting: too long raising boys who were hurt too much. Jane will knowingly manipulate anyone, will use anything he finds to hand, anything, no matter how sacred. Even the worst kinds of pain. Even his own.

For a second, the cynicism of that knocks her back, and the rage bleeds through.

“You know what? Fine. Suit yourself.” She starts toward the door.

“Lisbon.”

She turns, reluctant, but unable to deny him. He’s sitting forward on the couch, one hand still on the coffee cup, the other outstretched like he’d tried to catch her arm but had been too slow. The posture looks familiar on him, for some reason. Lisbon wishes she could see his face better. Everything is dim and blurred with blue.

For a moment, his jaw works like he’s trying to say something, but whatever it is, it gets pre-empted by the appearance of Cho.

“There you are. Rigsby’s out of surgery.”

\+ + +

The doctors won’t let anyone but Grace in to see Rigsby until the following morning. All three of them are ready to haunt the hospital’s halls until then, but Van Pelt insists they go grab a few hours’ rest.

“He’s asleep anyway, guys,” she says. Now that she’s seen Rigsby, now that they know he’ll be okay, she looks a lot more relaxed – and exhausted. “Seriously. Get out of here for a bit.”

Lisbon grabs her arm. “You need anything? Food? A pillow? A magazine?”

Grace smiles. “I’m all good. I’ll see you tomorrow. _Go_.”

Fischer has booked them a suite at the Residence Inn right next to the hospital without having to be asked, and Lisbon makes a mental note to thank her in the morning. Fischer answers the door wearing flannel boxers, an oversized FBI sweatshirt with a rip in the neckline, and a red pillow crease across her cheek. But she’s efficient as always, handing out extra keys as they stand around with exhausted shoulders in the middle of the anodyne sitting room. The kitchenette chairs are gray. The carpet is gray. The sectional is gray. There’s a fuzzy orange blanket draped over it, a shade that makes Lisbon think of shag carpets and canned laugh tracks. When she takes hold of the key card, its edges dig into her sensitized skin. Her eyes feel gritty.

“A suite was the cheapest,” Fischer is saying. “One bedroom’s two queens, the other’s a king. I had them put a rollaway in there. Lisbon, I figured you and I could bunk up, and the boys could flip for who gets the cot.”

Jane has made a beeline for the kettle and is already pulling out a Twinings bag of Earl Grey. “No need. I’ll take the couch.”

Cho doesn’t make him offer twice. “Thanks, man,” he says, and promptly disappears into the king bedroom.

Lisbon stalks over to Jane and plucks the teabag from his fingers. She can smell it: warm bergamot and dry leaf, crisp paper. It smells like Jane. His fingers are still trembling.

“That’s caffeinated,” she says.

He gives her one bleak, blank look. Slowly, she deposits the teabag back into his palm, pressing it down with a finger. He curls his hand back over it. Deliberately. Like he’s feeling each finger clench, feeling the tendons lever the knuckles down, feeling the muscles string tight. His grip catches on her index finger, which she was slow to remove, and she feels the pull of it, just for a second, as if he’s holding on.

“Get some sleep,” he says, and she wants to tell him the same, but she’s tired of everything she says to him being useless. She wants to say something to him that matters, something that changes things for him.

She thinks that never, in all these years, has she been able to do that.

When she comes out of the bathroom ten minutes later, Fischer and Cho already asleep in their respective bedrooms, he’s sitting on the sectional. Same posture she’d found him in at the hospital. She remembers her thought from earlier, that for all that he’s more conventionally sane now, he’s also so much more fragile.

And smaller, somehow. He’s relaxed, true, but it’s like all the colour has gone out of him, leaving him paler, almost translucent. His plans are less elaborate, like he’s not putting in the effort now that he isn’t desperate to mine the world for any tiny nugget of joy. Before, his depths had been pitch dark, but he’d sought out any bit of light he could to hold up as a flame against them: a deer by the side of the road, the light flaring through a tree on a fall morning, the taste of a fresh orange, the smug feel of a trick gone right. Now, he’s more content, but she’s not sure she’d say he’s _happier_. He’s just… less. Less intense, less alive, less _sharp_.

And he has been – less sharp, she means: he guesses wrong more now, misses things more often. He’s not as impressive. Less sure of himself. But he’s also less… untouchable. More real, more human. His secrets are human-sized now. There’s a man behind his eyes, a man recognizable as one, feeling things out as he goes. Feeling things.

Mostly, more often now, he doesn’t seem to know what to do next.

On cases, yes, but also in moments like this. They used to be times when he could harbor his strength, she thinks. Plan his next move against Red John. Now there’s nothing to plan for. Nothing worth his time. It sits heavy on his shoulders, pools in his motionless hands.

She flicks off the light on her way to the bedroom and leaves him sitting in the dark.

\+ + +

It’s almost four in the morning when he sees her again. She shuffles out of her bedroom, shuts the door carefully behind her, blinks in the dim light. Jane is hunched over the coffee table with the floor lamp lit. He looks up briefly at her, then back down at the cards he’s moving across the slick white surface of the table. She’s had a nightmare, that much is obvious. About Rigsby – he glances up again – No. About him. He supposes he should be flattered.

He watches the cards shuffle and reorder and rearrange themselves, like someone else is doing it. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, the time-warp lateness of the night. He moves his hands over the pool of light on the shiny table; through a trick of the eyes, it looks like they’re floating. His fingers have stopped shaking. He thinks they’ve stopped shaking. He gathers the fringes of the fuzzy orange blanket he’s wrapped around his shoulders.

“Bad one?” he asks.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her shrug. “I’ve had worse.”

She’s not lying, which is gratifying – both in terms of the principle and the content of her reassurance. Not dissembling, and not in distress. Makes him wonder about the _worse_ , though. He can usually tell, in the morning, if she’s had a broken night. Really bad ones are the most apparent: that’s when she treats herself to a coffee from the place down the block, and a cherry-pistachio biscotti to go with it. This doesn’t qualify as a biscotti incident, Jane concludes. He sets a note into his memory palace to find her one tomorrow anyway, and ties a mental string to it so he’ll remember around midmorning. She gets hungry a couple hours before lunch.

He gathers up the cards, plays them out again. Soothing rhythm. He lets them tell their story. Eight of spades: A dog in a moon suit rides the Ferris wheel at the Indiana State Fair. On the Mississippi, he meets a (nine of clubs) chain-smoking waitress in a bowler hat. Together they steal Monet’s _Waterloo Bridge_ from the Denver Art Museum and escape to Salt Lake City. He watches them drive west into the mountains in a rented 1967 Chevy Impala, top down, setting sun painting a brilliant vermilion swath on the glass dome of the dog’s moon suit.

Lisbon is watching, silent. There are over two and a half million five-card combinations in a deck of cards. To be exact: two million, five hundred ninety-eight thousand, nine hundred and sixty. Jane has spent so long with a deck of cards in his hands that he thinks he must have pulled them all. This: this is something he does not remember. Not for sure. He takes a sip of tea. Much-weakened Earl Grey. He tries to inhale its aroma, but stuck in his nostrils still is cold, pine, blood, snow. Jane’s stomach twists. He sets down the teacup.

“I just boiled more water,” he offers. “And there’s chamomile.”

She drifts to the cabinet, makes herself some tea in a glass because there’s only the one teacup. She sips it before it’s steeped, watching him. She’s thinking about her youngest brother, Jane sees, about how she would play gin rummy with him when she babysat, before her mom died. Jane flicks his fingers, watches his wedding ring catch the light. Palms a card so it disappears, and pulls it out from the bottom of the deck. Something that was lost, brought back. You need the stomach-dropping sensation of what’s missing to make the trick work. There’s the magic. There’s the miracle.

“What are you doing?”

“Inventing a new card trick.”

“Why?”

 _Because I wanted an activity that would let me watch my hands_. “It passes the time,” he says.

She sits beside him on the couch, close enough to fiddle with the fringe of the orange blanket. The dream is clinging to her, he knows. He can see. No blood in it, but cold. A lot of white. Snow, sky, his eyes. He shivers.

“You warm enough now?” she asks.

“Mostly.” He’s had about twelve cups of tea. It helped, sort of. He can feel his toes, at least.

“Jane.” She touches his shoulder, lightly. He feels that, too. Four of clubs, jack of clubs, five of hearts: oh, those three, now that would be a fun karaoke night. “What happened today?”

“You didn’t read the statements Fischer took?” He knows she didn’t. He’s stalling. She knows that, too, but she’ll let him, for a minute: the cold, after all, and the blood, and Rigsby, and her dream.

“You want to talk about it?”

Jane shrugs, a _not really_. “Check your waistband.”

She does. “The queen of hearts.”

“Oops. Other side.”

Lisbon sends him an exhausted look, but doesn’t protest. “King of hearts. I get it. Van Pelt and Rigsby. What does that make you?”

Jane collects the cards, shuffles again. He is not looking at her. “I’m not in the deck. There are no black hearts.”

“Jane,” says Lisbon, and there it is again: the heart he’s broken. He can shuffle and deal as many times as he wants. The suit’s not going to come back together. He tries again anyway, watching the cards interleave. He blinks, and the deck is gone. He hadn’t meant to do that.

“What happened?” asks Lisbon again, and this time she puts out a hand to stop the ceaseless jittery motion of his.

He can’t stop the sound that comes out of his mouth. Because he feels it. He feels her hand on his. For one blinding second, like a sun exploding, he can feel all his fingers. It hurts: the sensation, the relief. Reappearing, he thinks, must hurt like this.

He’s halted his shuffling, and Lisbon moves to take her hand away. Reflexively, he grips her fingers to stop her.

She looks at him. Sleep still lingers soft on her cheeks, at the corner of her eyes, like the smooth skin on patient water. She doesn’t speak again, but she’s still asking.

“Rigsby shot Haibach,” Jane admits, “just before he could cut off my fingers.”

Lisbon’s grip tightens unconsciously. “Oh, Jane,” she whispers, and he sees that she gets it. He does everything with his hands, everything. If Van Pelt were right and he had a soul, it would live in his hands. He brings things alive with them, makes things appear: it’s how he reminds himself he’s real in this world. Tricks and illusions, showmanship, but it’s the only thing he can do. The one good thing. He solves cases with his hands. Strikes and soothes with his hands, comforts and confronts. He speaks with his hands. Loves with them.

Lisbon takes his right hand, the one that had almost felt the axe’s blade, and she flips it over. Runs her fingers across his palm, over each joint. Traces up and down every finger, then loops on to the next. Then she goes backward. Up and down. Jane feels every finger as she outlines it, like her touch is bringing them into existence. Finally, finally he can close his eyes, and know they’re still there. Lisbon’s movements are light but sure. Jane lets out a long breath, allows his head to fall back against the couch cushion.

She moves to his left palm, marking the same tracery there. Everything fades out except the feel of her fingers on his, counting slowly. _One. Two. Three. Four. Five._ Then back. _Thumb. Index. Middle. Ring. Pinkie._ Back. _Minimus. Annularis. Medius. Secundus. Pollex._

“Jane,” she whispers, and he realizes he’s drifted off for a second. “Lie down.”

“Don’t stop,” he mumbles. “Please.”

“I won’t. I won’t. But you need to sleep. Lie down.”

“’Kay.” Painstakingly, he raises his legs onto the couch, shifts so he can sink down. His head lands in her lap, and oh, he is still cold after all; his ears feel frozen where they come in contact with her sleep-warm thighs. Greedily he turns his head to press his icy nose into her flannel pyjama pants. She doesn’t protest, only shifts the blanket so it’s covering him better, and a little warmth finally – finally – eases through his muscles, reaches his bones. His right arm is bent across his chest, and she hasn’t released his hand. She’s still letting him hold on, still drawing his fingers into existence with her own, still making them reappear. She, too, is a magician.

No, he thinks: here is the difference between magic and miracle. She doesn’t need to make something disappear in order to bring it back. She can tame without breaking, draw hearts with no trickery. Magnetic, like a creature called home.

He falls asleep to the feel of his hand in hers, and the image of a silver cat migrating a long way in the darkness back to the place it knows best, surefooted over the snow.


End file.
